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Social capital increasingly provides the greatest and most sustainable source of competitive advantage that is available to a business. It is a key source of created value, which enables organisations to set new, more stretching and potentially different business goals.

So how do you manage people and the organisational environment in a way that accumulates social capital and will lead on to this success?

I’m going to try to find out. Care to join me?

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I help organisations gain competitive advantage through the creation of human and social capital supported by effective leadership, HR and management practices, OD interventions, and the use of web 2.0 / social media tools etc.

I have worked for 20 years in Engineering, IT, change management and HR (including as an HR Director).

I am based in the UK but I have a global focus to my role and I spend a lot of time in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

I work with business leaders, HR departments and others to raise the level of their ambition to have more impact in their businesses. This often involves developing innovative, value creating people, team and organisation management / development strategies.
I also design and implement strategic people management programmes, for example in talent management and organisation development.

And I help increase value in individual HR processes and technologies eg performance management, the use of social media etc.

I also help business leaders and HR teams develop their own strategic capabilities.

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Monday, 17 December 2007

As I posted on my People Business blog at HR Circles last week, social networks are important in helping HR deal with global people management challenges. They provide significant benefits to other business leaders too.

One of the most provoking blog posts I’ve read this month is Gill Corkindale's Harvard Business blog on the leadership crisis in the UK. Looking at the prime minister, the chancellor and the government, the Bank of England and its governor, and a couple of football managers (you can probably guess which ones), Corkindale notes a long string of leadership failures. Most of them, to me, see to have developed through these leaders being too remote from their organisations – a lack of social connection.

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

I hope you like my new avatars (digital characters) on the right hand column of this blog - I suspect experienced bloggers will find them extremely annoying, but I hope I'm forgiven as a newbie for a bit of experimentation. I've also been doing a bit more playing around in Second Life (SL).

For those that don't know, SL is a three-dimensional, virtual reality world where you can meet interesting people, do amazing things, and live out your fantasies.

I've already mentioned that one of Mintzberg's remedies for short termism is to get the analysts of the backs of the corporation. Others are to:

Take corporate governance seriously

Keep the mercenaries out of the executive suites.

But I think Mintzberg's last suggestion is potentially the most valuable.This is:

Treat the enterprise as a community of engaged members, not a collection of free agents. We can start, for example, with compensation systems that encourage co-operative effort. Corporations are social institutions, which function best when committed human beings (not human "resources") collaborate in relationships based on trust and respect. Destroy this and the whole institution of business collapses.

I came across an interesting article on the floods across the UK recently: "When the waters clear". The articles notes that flooding destroys organisational but not social capital:

"Floods and other disaster destroy physical and financial capital. But not relations between people and their networks - what's often called social capital.

Even truckloads of goodwill can't offset the trauma of being flooded. Indeed, unlike any other form of capital - social capital can actually increase at a time of crisis. People who come together learn the importance of appreciating the value of neighbourly support, often act with greater community spirit in the aftermath of a disaster. All of us can help by encouraging the victims of the flood to look for solutions that will improve their lives instead of looking for someone to blame. Blaming often weakens social capital and undermines the return to "normalcy". Instead of looking for a hidden meaning behind the flood we ought to be focusing on learning the lessons. We now know that floods are normal part of our life. What we have to figure out is how much of our resources we are prepared to devote to minimising their destructive impact on our lives."

Ie it is our reactions to crises like floods, not the floods themselves, that can damage us most.I guess the same is true in organisations as well. It is a rare organisation that thinks about how it will react to challenges and particular failures in a way that will increase its social capital.